Historical Memory and Its (Dis)contents (original) (raw)

Efforts to recover and preserve the historical memory of past violence and injustice are today increasingly widespread in countries wrestling with, or emerging from, violent conflict. This reflects the rise of memory studies as a distinct field of inquiry as well as the growing recognition of the importance of centrally including the voices of victims in the elaboration of narratives of past suffering and evil. However, as an “essentially contested concept,” historical memory faces numerous challenges that have to be navigated when conducting applied historical memory work in violence-inflected settings. Among the pitfalls, historical memory work faces the unresolved tension between history and memory, which gives substance to claims that forgetting should trump remembering. Furthermore, owing to it being anchored in the subjective domain of memory, applied historical memory work risks deepening prevailing patterns of hatred, enmity and exclusion, in addition to being instrumentalis...